Note that this work is copyrighted, but as the copyright owner, I’m free to share, and I feel like a bit of sharing. Some errors of grammar still need to be fixed. The Intro pages have never been seen before. This takes place in the same “world” as “Home Sweet Home”, but later in the course of events. The complete book is for sale as either a paperback or download via lulu.com
Feedback, commentary, etc is appreciated.
August 1944
Captain Richardson was not a happy man. The morning had started with a nice warm bed, a hot breakfast, and the promise of a lovely blonde that evening. That all seemed on the other side of the world, as at that moment he was hanging from a tree on a hillside somewhere in Yugoslavia.
Richardson hadn’t even been on the flight rotation that day. He shouldn’t have been flying at all, but Lieutenant Mullins had broken his ankle. Slipped on a bar of soap. Thus Richardson had volunteered to fly as wingman to Major Olson. That had been his first mistake, volunteering. The second mistake had been being so intent in putting a burst into the Focke-Wulf in front of him, that he hadn’t seen the one coming up behind. He’d gotten kill number four, but had also gotten his Mustang shot to pieces.
Richardson had started off flying the Thunderbolts, good old solid as brick P47s. They had a huge air-cooled engine that soaked up the hits. Flew like a brick too. The Mustang was a thoroughbred in comparison, but it also had a liquid cooled Merlin engine. One hole in which meant getting back to England was a dicey proposition. Hence bailing out of a Mustang with a flaming engine because all of your oil leaked out…
Richardson had a .45 in his shoulder holster, which was now painfully digging into his ribs. The briefings had said to open up your escape kit and stash the bits and pieces throughout your clothes, to make it more likely that the Germans would miss some of it. Whoever had come up with that bright idea, had obviously never spent time swinging wildly in a parachute in the wind. Craning his neck, Richardson looked down at the ground. His best estimate put him about six feet from the ground, with the risers of his chute still caught up above his head.
The sound of a truck motor cut through the trees, coming from his right. Okay, Richardson thought, anything I’m going to do, I’d better do it. There was the heavy Ek knife hanging from his belt, six inches of solid blued steel in a hardwood handle. He’d bought it from a paratroop officer who needed the stake for a card game, figuring he could sell it back later. The damn thing had been useful enough that he’d kept it, and was wearing the sheath now. Time to drop, Richardson thought, reminded suddenly of Mullins and his ankle. Well, it beat letter the Germans get him, or worse yet some of their Croat militiamen. The Germans would just take him prisoner, if he were lucky. The Croats were liable to lynch him.
“Here goes nothing,” Richardson said, freeing his knife and holding it above his head. The hawsers on the chute were thick hemp rope, but the knife started to dig in almost immediately. “Geronimo,” he muttered under his breath, feeling the ropes give way. The ground rose up with a thud, as he tried to remember what the right was to hold his knees without injuring himself was. As it turned out, he must have guessed right, at least in so far as avoiding serious injuries were concerned. Less serious injuries were a different matter, Richardson realized, as he rolled to the side and crashed through a rather thorny bush. “Son of a bitch,” he cursed.
The sound of the trucks engine had now stopped, being replaced by the sounds of movement and stamping feet. A few words of shouted German were audible enough for Richardson to make them out, “Achtung” and “Schnell” were familiar enough, and reminded him that if he was going to do anything, he’d best do it soon. In theory, you were supposed to ditch your parachute, at least what’s they had said in all the lectures on Escape and Evasion. Richardson hoped that his old instructors would excuse him for not following procedure to the letter, but he didn’t think trying to hide his chute would do him much good when the Germans were already after him.
He drew his .45 and made a run for it, heading deeper into the woods and away from the road. The .45 was a heavy, slab sided automatic, and Richardson hadn’t fired it since training back in the States. Now he wondered whether he could hit anything with it if he tried. The last time he’d used it, they’d all been lined up during a field problem and told to shoot at a rusty metal washtub from a distance of about twenty paces. Like most of the recruits, he’d hardly been able to hit it. The gun was intended to assist in Escape and Evasion, whether it would or not, it at least made Richardson feel a bit better to have it.
“I should have never dropped out of the Boy Scouts,” Richardson whispered to himself. He had no idea what kind of trees surrounded him, though he knew they were some kind of hardwood. Luck had landed him on the edges of the forest, near a road, rather than tangled up in the higher, older trees. Have to keep moving, he thought. In truth, Richardson hadn’t paid much more attention to the escape and evasion lectures than he had to the films about VD. In both cases, he’s assumed that it would not, could not in fact, happen to him. “I should have learned my lesson after I had to get the penicillin,” he whispered.
Conscious of a burning thirst, he looked about, wondering if he might find water somewhere nearby. The Scouts probably would have helped me learn that too, he thought ruefully. As it stood, the best he could remember was that water tended to flow downhill and that moss was supposed to grow only on a certain side of a tree. But which damn side was it? He had no idea, and the little Cracker Jack box compass was in the bottom of the one of the plastic survival tins.
He heard the crashing of feet behind him, and shouting. The Germans couldn’t be far behind. The distance was too great to hear what they were shouting, but it certainly had the ring to it of military orders. Oddly, it reminded Richardson of being back in boot camp. Sergeants must sound the same all over, he thought ruefully.
Suddenly, looming ahead was a break in the trees. Richardson paused for a moment, where once there had been trees now lay only stumps, many of which looked burnt. Stretching across the break in the trees was a heavy wire fence. It was the sturdiest chain link that Richardson had ever seen. “What the hell?” he muttered, looking to the left and right, it seemed to go on for hundreds of yards, if not further.
The fence was topped with barbed wire, and also visible were connectors, suggesting the fence was electrified. “Son of a bitch,” Richardson muttered, hearing the sounds of pursuit draw nearer, the shouts mixing unmistakably with the sound of a dog barking now. He tossed a damp tree branch against the wire and saw it bounce away, sparking. A large red sign with a skull on it sat prominently on the on a post. It said simply “Verboten”. For a moment Richardson wondered if there was a minefield on the other side. But why would there be an electrical fence around a minefield? Looking at it more closely, it even looked as though the wire stretched under the ground.
“Why the hell would you do that?” Richardson muttered. He’d always been in the habit of whispering to himself when pondering a problem. It had almost gotten him kicked out of flight school when the proctor thought he was cheating on a test.
Behind him, the shouts grew more insistent. Running to the side now, he hoped to at least lose himself by going deeper in the trees. Then he saw it, a tear in the fence, sparks still flying from the wire. Right smack dab in the middle of the hole was the propeller assembly from a Focke-Wulf, the yellow and black spiral pattern still painted on it. The gap was just large enough that he could crawl through if he tried, without touching the wire.
He took one last cautious glance at another of the “Verboten” signs. Turning his head, he heard the sounds of his pursuers closing in. “What the hell,” he muttered; he might as well make them work for him. Carefully he pushed himself through the gap and then started running again.
One last look behind him at the Focke-Wulf propeller and he thought, “Must be my lucky day.” He kept running, heading across the clearing, hunched low, running towards the stumps and the tree growth beyond.
Richardson was so intent on running that he never noticed the oddly shaped lumps of soil or the glistening whiteness he passed by. He might have even stopped and cleaned earth away from it. If he had, he’d have discovered it to be a human skull, lying amidst more bones. Instead he just kept running, deeper into the area labeled “Verboten.”
Behind him, at the fence line, his pursuers paused, their faces showing fear. They were just Luftwaffe flak gunners and ammunition handlers. Turned out when the alarm bell rang to try to chase down the Ami pilot. Now though, they paused before the area labeled forbidden, the area that they were told never to approach. The pause became a dead stop. A radio message was sent asking for orders. Nearly half an hour passed before a truck arrived from the road, followed by two Hanomags and a staff car.
The staff car disgorged two men. One wore the black uniform of an SS Colonel, the other a dark pinstriped suit. The flak gunners thought it odd that the Colonel seemed to defer to the other man, calling him only “Herr Doktor”.
Odder still was that the Hanomags swiveled their MG-42s towards the woods, as though they expected some threat far greater than a lone American pilot to materialize at any moment. Two dozen men in splinter camouflage smocks descended from the armored half tracks, almost all of them armed with the new and rarely seen MP-44 assault rifles. The flak gunners looked at their own Kar98s, simple bolt action rifles, and wondered now whether it was the pilot who was so important, or what lay beyond the fence. The only men not armed with MP-44s were the last four men to disembark, each of whom had a flamethrower strapped to their back.
The SS Colonel spoke harsh words to the sergeant in charge of the flak gunners, and he quickly loaded all of his men onto the truck. In all honesty he’d be glad to get away, things were too strange for his taste. Better to get back to their 88’s and scanning the skies for a threat they could understand. The final incongruity the Luftwaffe men noticed as their truck sped away was that the men in splinter smocks were all pulling on gas masks.
In the harsh months to follow, most of the men present that day would be killed. The SS Colonel would survive the war and take advantage of a program called Project Paperclip. His identity disk listed his name as Goethe, but he’d get a new name when his family was resettled in Canada. The doctor would survive the war as well; he’d never even be tried as a war criminal. Eventually, he’d return to his wife’s homeland.
As the other men pulled on their gas masks, the Doctor lit a cigarette, pulling it from a gold plated case. It was a gift from an important benefactor, though the benefactor didn’t smoke, loathed it in fact. Like many state gifts, looted from concentration camp inmates. The old owner’s name was still engraved inside. The inscription read, “To my beloved husband, Abraham Kaufman.” The Doctor wasn’t fond of such sentimentality, but a photograph of his wife and young son, Emil, standing near an alpine meadow, nicely hid it. The Doctor snapped it shut and ran his fingers along the inscription. “To Doctor Ernst Lang, From Heinrich Himmler, For Service to Science and the Reich”.
Recent Comments